I was starting to get worried about my iTunes backup drive and what would happen if that went west. My iTunes library is about 250gb in size and as my iPod has a 160gb drive and only about 60gb was being used I thought it would make some sense to fill it up and then I would at least have a partial 3rd backup of the iTunes library.

Of course dealing with these huge amounts of data puts a strain on systems left right and center. I did a couple of 10gb updates to the iPod with no trouble then checked a lot more iTunes entries which must have totalled about 50gb more music to sync with the iPod. Now that is a lot of files to copy and was going to take some time. I monitored its progress and it was going to take days. Then all of a sudden it finished, far sooner than I had expected. I also saw a message that the PC drive was having problems and to run Scandisk. Which I did and which failed as the drive couldn’t be accessed for various reasons. In fact nothing could access it.

Thought about this for a couple of days and tried a few things with no luck. I even tried Spinright, which I’ve used before and does fix hard drives, but that needs to be booted from it’s own FreeDOS bootable CD or floppy and that doesn’t recognise USB drives, which the Itunesmusic folder was on. The Spinright web page says something about finding hard drive USB drivers for Open DOS O/S’s. Maybe I should have looked at that option but the thought of messing about with config.sys files didn’t actually fill me with optimism. The other option was to somehow interface the USB drive directly onto the motherboard. Couldn’t think how to do that at all. So I returned to a bit of software I have used before which is ‘iPod to Computer Transfer’ and copies files from the iPod to wherever you want and the obvious place was the backup iTunesmusic folder. The small niggly problem here was that the backup hadn’t been sync’d with the iTunesmusic for a couple of months and was therefore out of date with recently added music and films. Everything that I have updated iTunes with though had been sync’d onto the iPod. I was therefore able to use the iPod to update an out of date backup of the iTunesmusic folder.

The version of iPod to Computer software that I use copies over everything, shame it doesn’t check whether the source file already exists on the target folder which would decrease the copy time considerably. Anyway it doesn’t and the copy back process needs to copy just over 15,000 files which I figure is going to take about 36 hours. Now what chance is there that all this copying back from the iPod to the PC process, with the iPod hard drive being read constantly, is going to bust that drive?

Hmmm…Led Zeppelin to reform without Robert Plant and apparently the fans are up in arms about it. If Zeppelin got a replacement singer he’d be on a hiding to nothing, whether he looked or sounded like Plant or he didn’t. Of course if they didn’t call themselves Zeppelin but another name like XYZ then that problem goes away. Double hmmm…didn’t Jimmy Page make some tracks with a couple of guys from Yes in the early 1980’s and weren’t they at one point going to be called XYZ? I believe they did, and I have a bootleg CD of some of those tracks. And were they any good? Can’t remember (Not very memorable then? Ed).

I noticed on one of the bootleg newsgroups that there are always loads of Zeppelin boots up there. Often when I listen to a single short track to check the quality it’s not that hot but then a lot of these boots are Zeppelin shows that I’ve never heard of having been booted before or if they were they were such a sludge of sound that they were just about unlistenable. I assume these old bad quality shows are being reedited with new digital sound editors and somehow greatly improving the sound quality of some sludge. Sort of bringing them back from the dead.

There are never any Page & Plant boots from the tours between 1995 and 1998 on the newsgroups though, which is a shame. I have a couple of dozen of these shows on CD and they are good. Four of them were broadcast on FM so the sound for them is all right, though squashed like FM always is. These being San Jose in 95, Paris in 96, the Bizarre Festival somewhere in Germany in 98 and Glastonbury in about 97.

I tried using Microsoft’s Virtual PC software the other day. I started with Virtual PC 2004 but that didn’t work with Vista (Does anything? Ed). Downloaded Virtual PC 2007 and installed that OK on Vista and managed to create some VM’s OK. Well I say OK but it does take some fiddling to get the VM’s to boot.

The creation of the VM is straightforward but it does need and operating system installed. If you have created the VM correctly then the VM will have access to a CD/DVD drive, then you can stick in a Vista O/S disc and reboot and off its goes. What is slightly worrying is that the VM’s hard disk, which is just an allocated area of the host O/S’s hard drive, usually the C: drive, is also called the C: drive, and the first thing Vista wants to do is format the logical C: drive. Man, was I worried when I OK’d that format process. Anyway it worked OK and Vista installed itself. So I had a Vista VM working on the host Vista O/S

Then I tried an XP VM, which also worked OK. I have numerous XP and Vista setup disks and some worked and installed themselves and others did squat. Where I had trouble I’d get an ISO O/S disk and write that as a setup disk and that tended to work. I also have a whole page of activation codes and some worked and others didn’t, though they all should have.

For my third VM I thought I’d try XP Media Center and the first disk installed OK but then the installer wanted me to insert disk 2, which I did but I think the files it was looking for were buried a few folders down and I couldn’t browse to them. That VM is half way built and until such time as I extract the necessary folder’s files and write them to a fresh CD/DVD and in the route directory and let that process finish, that’s that.

The other day at work I had to install VMWare Workstation, which appears to work in a similar way. This software is getting popular and though it is relatively straightforward creating VM’s and installing operating systems on them the devil is in the detail, like does the host operating systems printer work via the VM, does it connect to the net, how fast is it to use etc etc. Endless fun tinkering with this stuff.